1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and program for navigating files.
2. Description of the Related Art
In an application development environment, software developers may work at workstations and download program files, such as source code files, they need from a host system. The source code programs being developed may be organized into data sets, where the data set may have a name including qualifier components that provide descriptive information on the files associated with that data set. For instance, a data set may have one qualifier providing some descriptive name, another qualifier indicating the type of program being developed, e.g., Cobol, C++, Java™, etc., and then another qualifier indicating the type of files, e.g., source code, object code, dynamic libraries, etc. (Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.)
A developer may search the host for data sets whose name qualifiers satisfy certain search criteria. Upon locating those data sets, the developer user interface would then download from the host all data sets that satisfy the search criteria and their file members to the developer workstation. The developer user interface may then render a hierarchical tree representation of the data sets and component files where the data sets are displayed at a same hierarchical level and the member files of each data set are displayed as children or branches of the data sets in which they are a member. The user may then peruse different data sets and member files by traversing the rendered hierarchical tree representations of the retrieved data sets and components. The hierarchical tree may be quite large and time consuming to navigate when the tree displays nodes for data sets having thousands of member files.